Rover walking

This was my final year project, and this page is work in progress (despite the work being fairly old now).

There’s more information on the robot, Blodwen, here: the picture at the top of this page shows it in an early incarnation, powered by a lead-acid battery and using a network as the on-board PC.

The short answer, by the way, is “probably not.” I’d hoped that using some kind of walking gait on slopes would help overcome slip on the powdery surface, but it’s quite inefficient. More work needs to be done with better motor control algorithms, and probably better motors. Here’s a video:

The full report is available here .

This project heavily used the Angort language: it proved very useful in developing both the subsumption system which managed the gaits and the artificial endocrine system which switched between them.

Angort is still used for everyday driving in Blodwen: it is trivial to connect to the system and type

reset calib
300 d

to reset, recalibrate and drive.